


Prologue

by belovedmuerto



Series: He Kindly Stopped For Me [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Death, Gen, Mythology - Freeform, Prologue, but not character death, teaser
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-27 21:44:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belovedmuerto/pseuds/belovedmuerto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An introduction to John Watson and Sherlock Holmes, as you don't yet know them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is a prologue, which is why not a whole lot happens. This will be a series, and this part has been written for a while now. I hope you enjoy it, because I've sure as hell enjoyed writing it, and am looking forward to writing more like you wouldn't believe-- I just won't let myself get to it before I finish up the last couple stories (for now) in the EiE 'verse. It's been A LOT of fun already, y'all, and it's going to be even more fun going forward.
> 
> (Bonus points if you get all my little references. I am a classical historian, I am going to nerd out like WHOA on this.)

The child who will come to be known as Sherlock Holmes is born of his mother’s heart. Many, many centuries later, in a fit of what amounts to adolescent pique (something that by this time most who know him believe he’s made into an art form and perfected) he will accuse his mother, who was born fully-formed of her father’s head, of trying to one up that man. His mother will merely give him a withering look and tell him to get off her mountain and go bother his brother for a bit. His mother has little patience for adolescents of any kind since that fiasco in Troy, even her own.

Sherlock, who does actually know what’s good for him despite all evidence to the contrary, will vacate the mountain posthaste, and spend the next few decades being a thorn in his older brother’s side.

\----

The child whose parents name him John Watson is born the normal way, in a hospital sometime during the 1970s. The delivery nurse nearly drops him, however, when he first opens his eyes and they are black. Blackest black, no white showing at all, as though his pupil has overtaken the sclera. She will never forget the depth of those black eyes, the hint of distant stars, or the sudden smell of spring flowers, despite the fact that it’s mid-January. She will, however, dismiss it as fancy, a dream, the length of her shift, when he blinks and his eyes and they are the same blue as the other children she’s helped deliver on that particular day.

\----

Sherlock is taught to read and write, as is befitting the son of a goddess. He learns rhetoric and mathematics, despite declaring both of them boring, and the sciences, which he finds far more interesting. He learns statecraft at his brother’s knee. He has no interest in it beyond the theoretics, but his brother does take such delight in moving his little human chess pieces around the board (although he won't come to refer to them as such for many, many years), and Sherlock doesn't lose the sense of awe his brother inspires for many long centuries (something which his brother has never let him forget).

He is raised in Athens, with the same family that raised his brother (who, yes, eventually chooses the name Mycroft for himself), devoted servants of his mother, sworn into secrecy and held there with strongest spells and rituals. They are good people, kind and only just reverent enough for Sherlock to take full advantage of their awe and their devotion. He spends as much time as he can get away with in wine, women (and men) and song, flippant of his requirements as the living embodiment of the combination of mortality and immortality. He rarely goes to temple or makes sacrifices— with the exception of his grandfather's high holy days, as he doesn't fancy a lightning bolt to the head— and he blasphemes like the absolute worst of sinners.

His uncles delight in his chaos, and his godmother despairs to the stars of him. His mother mostly rolls her eyes and looks to his brother; _do please try to keep the boy in line_.

Sherlock studies at the Library, later on when he’s left the Isles (chased out, actually; the natives have got restless of his seeming eternal youth). He maintains a lively correspondence with Librarian after Librarian, until eventually the Library is lost.

It is one of the few things he ever mourns.

\----

John Watson is taught reading and writing and maths, just like all primary school children in the UK.

He learns the planets of the solar system and about stars and supernovas, and remembers watching the first star explode into life.

 _I did that_ , he thinks. _And I will watch the last star burn out at the end of all things, too. I wonder if there will be anybody left to watch it with me_. He thinks that would be a nice thing, to have someone by his side, when the time finally comes for the last of creation to be swept away. (And where will that leave him but to start the whole process over again?)

His teachers don't believe him when he explains how black holes actually work and why they're made that way, and he eventually learns to keep his mouth shut.

\----

Both of their mothers despair of them, as children.

Sherlock's because he won't ever be like his brother, or like any of his heroic cousins. He has far too much curiosity, far too much love of the question why? Too much interest in the way things look when they're dead and the way strange substances make him feel to pursue normal demigodly activities.

Instead he takes to the sciences and to medicine. He takes to looking back, and to looking forward.

“How long will I live?” he asks, often.

“I don't know, my boy,” his mother replies. “Until Death comes for you, I expect. He comes for us all, even the gods.”

\----

John's mother despairs of the mournfulness of her son. He is very quiet and sometimes when he appears by her bedside at night, tears on his chubby little cheeks and nightmares swirling about his head, she could almost swear his eyes are darker than the night surrounding them.

“I know how long you will live,” he whispers.

“Hush now,” his mother replies, though she shivers at the thought. “We all live as long as we're supposed to, John. Try not to think about the bad things, m'love, go back to sleep.”

“Death isn't a bad thing,” her melancholy son replies. “It's just another thing.”

\----

When John is twelve and Harry fifteen, he tells her how she's going to die. She slaps him.

When the phone call comes about their father, John has already put on his coat and is waiting by the front door to go to the hospital to stand next to his mother when she identifies his father's body. John holds her hand.

He and Harry go together when it's their mother's turn. John holds Harry's hand. She's drunk, and she looks at him with real fear for the first time in her life, wondering _what are you?_

John doesn't tell her. He puts on the unassuming and reassuring smile that he's learned over the years, and thinks about all the times his fragile mortal brain had needed a sister and she hadn't been there.

This isn't turning out to be the best vacation he's ever had, but he wouldn't trade it for anything.

\----

Sherlock takes to sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll like he was born to it; perhaps he was. What else is there when life has become so dreadfully boring? He can no longer tell you if he enjoyed the seventies or the eighties more, mostly because he doesn't remember either decade.

He goes back to uni for a while when he's bored, but spends more time and money on cocaine than on his studies, and Mycroft seizes his bank accounts. Again.

Sherlock steals a skull from one of the medical labs. He names it Demosthenes.

Mycroft steals the British government, and no one notices. He calls it his little game.

Sherlock steals him a skull as well, and tells him its name is Pericles. Mycroft calls him a blasphemous and disrespectful brat, but he keeps it in his bedroom and talks to it nearly as much as Sherlock talks to his own.

\----

John goes to university and to medical school. He works hard to learn to heal the human body. He is endlessly fascinated by its workings and its fragility. He is endlessly fascinated by the dichotomy of knowing precisely who he's meant to save and whose time it is when he looks at him. It gives him headaches, the war between the very human desire to save them and the knowledge that he can't fight what he set in motion himself before time began.

He works even harder not to see time ticking down for everyone he meets, like a countdown flashing in neon over their heads. It's possible, when he tries hard enough, to turn it off, for a while. Sometimes he can manage to go a whole day without seeing anyone's death. It's a pleasant change. He remembers his adolescence, when he couldn't turn it off and it nearly drove him insane.

And then he goes to war.

 There's a reason, he recalls later when he's lying in a growing pool of his own blood and laughing because this isn't his end but it's still the most horrible thing he's ever felt, that he usually schedules these mortal vacations when there aren't a great number of wars going on.

He tries to avoid war. He's too busy at his real job during wars.

He doesn't like the messy human part of death, to be honest. He much prefers his regular role in it. That split second between one heartbeat and the next, when the next heartbeat isn't coming and all things are entirely possible; everything is light and energy and possibility and he reaches in to— well. He doesn't much discuss that. Some secrets are best when kept.

He sees his children when he looks hard enough, surrounding people, waiting for the moment when the change happens. They smile at him, and they bow to him. They are his, the ones he has gathered over the millennia, to aid him. None of them are actually his children in a biological sense— and if he has to explain why it is that he doesn't have biological children we'd be here til the end of time— but they're the ones he's gathered to him and made his own. They are his family, his shades, his minions (when he's feeling particularly morbid).

\----

Sherlock enjoys a good murder. Perhaps he enjoys it more than is good for him, and his brother warns him with a quirked eyebrow and a lift of that well-suited shoulder not to do anything rash.

Mycroft should know by now, he really should. He doesn't have any desire to commit them himself, he just wants to fix them.

The first time he stumbles upon one of Lestrade's crime scenes and sees _everything_ is the first time in decades he's felt anything. It is glorious.

This is when Sherlock discovers The Work, and it consumes him in ways that nothing has in longer than he cares to remember.

\----

John marches towards his own end with grim determination.

Not that he wants to die, per se. But he sees it coming, a mirage on the horizon: himself, dying in a dank alley with a tall someone he can't quite identify looming over him. His attacker? Something else? He can never see much of the event itself, beyond his own body, his own emotions, his own pain, everything's a blur.

He's weary though, of the mortal coil, of the inescapable misery of it. He has a hard time seeing the beauty of the world, after he comes home from Afghanistan. He wants to go home.

His therapist tells him to write it all down, and he looks her and thinks, _at least you're going to die of old age and not in a pool of your own blood in some dank alleyway somewhere_.

But all he says is, “Nothing happens to me.”


End file.
